Tee Twyford is described as having an infectious passion for all things digital, an insatiable appetite to learn and an innate curiosity for what drives people. For these reasons, it’s no wonder her career includes several senior management positions across social media, digital marketing and content strategy for Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry and Charlotte Tilbury as well as Editor-in-Chief of nzgirl (NZ’s first social magazine and digital media leader).

When Emma was at primary school, her mother was told she was so severely dyslexic, it was unlikely she would learn to read or write. Emma’s mother is not one to give in to adversity easily so took matters into her own hands and removed nine-year-old Emma from school. After four years of home schooling, Emma went to secondary school and left after the 6th form for university where she achieved a BA and a Masters in Criminology – all despite her primary school teacher’s predictions.

Having overcome dyslexia, Emma now believes it is one of her biggest assets. “Once you get dyslexic children to a point where they can compete on a level playing field then they have a huge advantage because they can see problems from a different view point.”

What do Margaret Thatcher, the Queen, Kiri Te Kanawa, the All Blacks, Grant Dalton and Helen Clark have in common? They all happen to have been fortunate enough to have been fed by Suze Glynn. You don’t know Suze Glynn? Well, if you have been living in or passing through London in the past 35 years, you may well have either met her or enjoyed her catering. Or, for those expat New Zealanders living in the UK and hankering for the tastes of home, it’s very likely that you have Suze and her husband Tom to thank for the ready availability of Marlborough Sav Blanc or greenshell mussels. They are widely credited with being pioneers in the London catering scene although that was never the plan when they left New Zealand for the usual OE in 1976...

Drive explores what has motivated humans throughout history and explains how we shifted from mere survival to the carrot and stick approach that’s still practiced today – and why it’s outdated.

Most people have been taught to believe that the best way to motivate is to use rewards like money, but according to Daniel Pink people are making a mistake thinking that external rewards are the best way to motivate. He calls this Motivation 2.0.

There is scientific evidence that this rarely provides long-term performance improvements. Extrinsic motivation is based on the idea that if we want to increase a behavior we need to reward it and if we want to decrease a behaviour, we must use punishment. However, when people are motivated only by external rewards, they often shift their attention from the experience leading to the goal to the reward that follows the goal.

Pure focus on goals may cause systematic problems for organisations such as focus only on short-term gains and lose of sight of the potential devastating long-term effects on the organisation. The symptoms of goals only focus include:

Extinguishing intrinsic motivation

Diminishing performance

Crushing creativity

Crowding out good behaviour

Encouraging cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behaviour

Becoming addictive

Fostering short-term thinking

Instead Pink suggests that the secret to high performance and satisfaction at work, at school, and at home consists of three pillars: the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to become better at things that matter to us, and to do something meaningful for ourselves and the world. He calls this Motivation 3.0.

He feels there are three elements we must provide to workers in this category:

Autonomy—”the desire to direct our own lives;”

Mastery—”the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and”

Purpose—”the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Pink does not suggest that people will work for free or for a non-competitive wage. He categorizes “salary, contract payments, some benefits” and “a few perks” as “baseline rewards.” When baseline rewards are insufficient, workers will focus on how they are treated unfairly and their creativity will decline rapidly. However, once the baseline rewards are high enough that they are no longer a factor in the worker’s focus, adding additional extrinsic rewards will only dampen motivation.

This does not mean that everyone should stop using external rewards. Rather, it is important to understand that for routine tasks, which aren’t very interesting and don’t require creative thinking, rewards can provide a small motivational booster shot without harmful side effects.

He does not suggest eliminating all rewards. Instead, he warns against using “if-then” rewards and promotes the use of “here-now” rewards that are given out unpredictably. These rewards can be as simple as praise, a lunch out, or genuine and detailed feedback. They should not be introduced at the start of a project as a condition of success, nor should they become predictably routine.